Standard Missile and Tomahawk question

Does anyone know if the Standard Missile family or if the Tomahawk cruise missile can be used against surface ships? From what I can find various sources say they can be used in this role but I’m not finding any specifics like ranges, speeds and platforms. Also, does the US Navy currently have the capability to use these two missiles in this role? If anyone has more information about this it would be greatly appreciated.

The Tomahawk was originally designed with an anti-ship version. The TASM and the TLAM are the two Tomahawk versions. The Standard also has an anti-ship componant, but it's not very good at it since it has a fairly small warhead.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isnt the Tomahawk designed to hit fixed targets base on satellite topograghy data. This would make them, without a new giudance system, somewhat ineffective against a moving target.

The T-LAM is. There was also a T-ASM, originally sub launched, but now carried on the AEGIS ships.

i can shed a little light on the subject, Standard could engage surface targets, as too the british Sea dart( make no mistakes these were no Harpoons or exocets) but this was more a last ditch effort, but they could be guided to the target.
As for the remaining tomahawks versions. i would guess if you are that sure of the ships postion you could guessimate and feed in the lat/long and fire, the lesser the range the better the chances.

The T-ASM uses GPS to guide it to the area, then uses radar to look for targets. The GPS guided version is the T-LAM. The T-LAM and T-ASM are different.

Thanks for the info guys, hey Zap you said AEGIS ships carry the T-ASM version, so I’m assuming that Burks carry them right?

Also, at what ranges would the SM be able to engage surface ships?

the T-ASM doesnt exsit any more. was taken outta service some years back, was always pretty useless as by the time it arrived at subsonic speed 250mls+ any ship was 40mls away in any direction, thats why the west as stayed in this under 100mile anti ship missile club, while the rest of the world has gone for more speed to get the longer ranges.

WestPoint23,

Veehaa has it right though he 'tends to forget' that the TASM had the Harpoon seeker group and so could probably have been made to receive updates just like AGM-84. The problem then being that nobody wanted to put a Carrier at the disposition of the surface/sub yacht club and so nobody /could/ generate targeting for it (they also restricted the deployment of APS-137 on the P-3 for much the same reason).

It should also be noted that the 109B had a passive RF target classification capability and at about this time, the Penguin (roughly a third the weight) was doing fullup hull classification and hulk/decoy rejection 'on the fly' (without support against a highly cluttered target background) while the Sunburn and late model AS-6 were able to assign for the whole formation.

And so the notion that the missile itself could not perform the target sort is also misleading, not least because you have upwards of _470nm_ worth of range on the system (even with the seeker and warhead weight, the fuel reduction was greater than required) so you could easily perform grid or spiral search patterns and potentially even short popup scans before returning to lolo for optical closure.

What it basically comes down to is the U.S. forces have always been scared pissless of Cruise showing them up as utter incompetent knight-on-his-steed warriors and have done everything in their power to prevent these superior weapons systems from being fully integrated as effective _competitors_ with manned systems. Just as they are now doing with UAV/UCAVs.

Finally, don't be fooled by Standards warhead weight. That's a 1,400lb missile folks. If you saw it fired out of a 16" gun as a half-weight Mk.13 HCC, you wouldn't doubt it's destructive power. Yet the Standard arrives at twice the speed of a 16" shell and it's motor is often still burning.

Against the virtually unarmored superstructures of today's classes in particular, the result is a _devastating_ impact and you don't need to do more than strip a ship of it's navigation and search/attack systems to render it impotent.

An outcome made made far more likely by the imminent arrival of 4-5 more 'as necessary'.

Range is dependent on guidance mode. If you have an OTH illuminator option (either a helo with an X-band or a tropobounce search radar) you can tether the weapon to a point where it will kill what it sees. If you don't, you have to rely on the RGM-66C's ARM modes. Note that _all_ Standards have an inherent SSM mode (as did Terrier/Tartar before them) and so range is going to be dependent on type with 40-70nm impacts not being out of the question.

The LASM conversions by comparison use a new INS/GPS coordinate optimized parabolic trajectories to hostage targets between 150-200nm inland.

Standard is an /awesome/ kinematic performer.

Yeah thanks CH that’s why I asked because with the range and payload of the Tomahawk it could be an incredible long range SSM. I just didn’t have any info on why the Navy didn’t use them. Also all (basically one) of our long range SSM’s like the Harpoon are subsonic, a Mach 2.5 SM-2 with a medium to long range would be better in some respects than the Harpoon.

Sure, tomahawk has a great range, but that was also the killer. You can't fire a subsonic missile 400 NM and expect 1) the target to still be there, 2) no one else to have slipped into the way. U.S. doctrine pretty much requires positive ID on a target before we engage it, and certainty that we won't accidently kill a target we weren't aiming for.

Not really, I’m sure if we launched multiple Tomahawks and guided them with a data uplink from AEW aircraft they would be hard to detect and we could update their flight path via data link to guide them where the target is. Once close enough the Tomahawk would go active and home in on its own.
It’s betters then waiting to hit a surface ship which can carry 350 miles supersonic SSM’s with a 150 miles subsonic Harpoon.

well, I'm certainly not going to argue against the value of having better missiles than the next guy, but most of the likely warzones are so full of commercial traffic that once someone shuts off thier emmitters you won;t be able to pick them out of the crowd.

Still, it's kinda fun to imagine just how capable a SS missile the US could porduce, if we suddenly decide we need one and put the money behind it.